Saturday, 4 February 2017

Ceviche at CEVICHE; Travels in Tonga, Time & Space (pt 1)

Let's cut to the chase. Ceviche. Raw fish dish. From Peru. At a renown
London venue, also called Ceviche. Ah ceviche! My dish for the road. Cue
tangential preambles to travels in Peru. Such a beautiful country! Such amazing
adventures!

Like the time when I inadvertently became a marauding alpaca herder on
the High Andes. That was so fun! And of course the time when I went to the
airport with a consignment of coca-leaf tea for grandma - she loved a nice
cuppa, bless her - only to discover that it's apparently highly illegal,
and two burly Customs officers and one cavity search later, suddenly found
myself in a dank Peruvian jail for a period of several months, rescued only
after I grassed up a fellow inmate, a notorious gangster by the name of El
Diablo, whose fierce henchmen still continue to track me down, which is why I
now live incognito as a food-blogger. Well, what a lark that
was!

And then the time when.. oh, you know what, just screw it. I've never
been to Peru, okay? I can't keep this pretence up any longer. So here's the
thing - instead of Peru, I'm gonna write about somewhere else, a country that
also does ceviche, a place I've actually been to..

*

The year was 1999. I was but a dewy-eyed medical student, seeking
somewhere exciting for a clinical placement abroad. Flicking through student
reports, I came across this country called Tonga. Sounded very exotic and
African. Perhaps somewhere between Togo and Congo, with a national dance called
The Conga. [Conga /n. = what people did at weddings after consuming two
Snowballs and a pineapple cheese-stick; some say an early harbinger of Brexit].
So I sent off an application.

Then someone told me Tonga wasn't actually in Africa at all. So I looked
it up in an atlas. [atlas /n. = wot people used before Googlemaps
to find out where things were in the world, you know it's like a book. A book?
A collection of paper bound together with words on, wot people used before the Kindle?
No? Oh, nevermind..]

And there it was, a smattering of little yellow speckles strewn over
South Pacific blue, almost as if someone had accidentally knocked over a sugar
bowl. Hanging above them lay big black letters, T-O-N-G-A, as if they too
represented their own archipelago.

It says a lot when a country’s name is larger than the actual country.
Particularly when the name is already pretty compact. For some countries, that
means being under the throes of a totalitarian regime who'd paradoxically lump
the epithet ‘DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF’ into the name in some sort of ironic
gesture. Or, to borrow an example from the near future, THE TRUMP CONGLOMERATE
OF STATES FORMERLY KNOWN AS AMERICA™. Tonga however just happened to be very
small.

It was also very far. Very very far. In fact, it's about as far as you
can physically get from London. And just to push to boat out even further -
almost literally - my eventual placement was on Tonga’s remote island of
Vava’u. To get there, you needed to fly 11 hours to Los Angeles, 12 hours on to
Auckland, 6 hours to Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa, and then another 2 hours
beyond that. Yes, even longer than a journey on Southern rail..

*

So there I was on the airport tarmac, boarding an old Otter T’prop to
take the internal flight to Vava’u. I climbed the stairs to the plane, presented
my boarding card, and was ushered to the left. To some, that'd mean
First Class (yay!). But not for me (boo!). Instead, I was led
right through the front end of the cabin, and on past the door into.. the
cockpit.

You see, Finau, my guesthouse owner, also happened to be the local
manager for Royal Tongan Airlines. After discussing our mutual love for planes,
he generously arranged for me to sit in the cockpit on the way out. (ah,
those days pre-Sept 2001..)

It was when Captain Bob handed me control of a lever that a very
disconcerting thought arose: had there been some awful misunderstanding. Did
they actually think I could fly a plane? Luckily, before I could dwell on that
too long, Captain Bob was demonstrating how the lever operated.. the
headphones. Phew!

Suddenly a noise came over the earpiece: traffic control was issuing its
instructions. This was so beyond cool. I even began actually muttering
to myself, “This is so beyond cool! It's fucking awesome!”. Only then
did I notice the mic attached to my headphones, and the real possibility my
words were being broadcast down the plane to the passengers, who’d no doubt be
somewhat disconcerted to hear such utterances emanating from the cockpit.

Fortunately, we landed safely enough in Vava’u, my home for the next two
months. And also the theme for these next three blog posts. So to kick-off this
Tongan trilogy, I guess I'd better start talking food..

*

Now, I absolutely loved Tonga. Its people. Its culture. Its lush green
landscapes, its powder-white beaches and its inky blue seas. And I wouldn't
want to say a bad word.. But the food, well it sucked.

That's not to say you couldn't eat delicious food. There was the
freshest fish straight outta the ocean. And you can gorge on the juiciest
tropical fruit. But in terms of creative cookery, well there just didn't seem
to be that much of a tradition. I never saw a sauce or stew, a pudding or a
pastry, or even any herbs or spices. The only herbs I saw were used for
healing, something I did some research on whilst out here.

Moreover, despite all the fresh produce, Tonga’s most popular dish
seemed to be lu pulu. This may sound exotic, but was in fact a tinned
melange of ambiguous cow anatomy steeped in a carefully-balanced assortment of
E-numbers; in other words, corned beef. Tins of the stuff were so ubiquitous
that you wonder how such small islands could accommodate so much cow. Except of
course it was all imported, a Minnesotan meat executive's fantasy to have such
an obliging market.

And to wash it all down, Royal Islands Orange Soda. This tropical
paradise bursts with the freshest fruit, yet the most popular drink was
seemingly a totally synthetic product constituted from brominated vegetable
oil. (yum!) The can’s marketing even celebrated this with an ambitious boast: “artificially
flavoured - contains NO juice!” (I do recommend the 1997 vintage though, a
breakthrough year for E101.)

Perhaps the joint collective of E-numbers when you simultaneously ingest
Spam and soda somehow chemically react to simulate a sensory experience akin to
a chateaubriand with a fine claret, or perhaps the moment of spiritual ecstasy
experienced only by certain priests at the point of nirvana. But to me, it
seemed a shame that such junk food had totally gripped the local diet. Indeed,
it was perhaps not surprising that diabetes and obesity were huge public health
issues here.

*

One dish that did buck the trend however was ota ika, a Tongan
version of ceviche. This combination of raw tuna or snapper with peppers, tomatoes,
chilli, lime juice and coconut milk was a find, particularly if the fish was
freshly caught.

Now London may have the world’s cuisines at its feet, but you'd be
hard-pressed to find a Tongan ota ika. Instead, the closest thing would
probably be a classic Peruvian ceviche, and for that we're pretty blessed. Even
the laziest researcher sourcing ceviche in London could find, erm, Ceviche.
It does what it says on the tin, and does it exceptionally well.

Take its ‘Don Ceviche’, for instance. Even in the dimly-lit cavernous
space of the Old Street branch, bright orange chunks and crisps of sweet potato
flare into the darkness like a sparkler on Bonfire night.

But the cleverness of the dish is the precise balance of flavours and
textures. Sweet potato grounds the dish with its earthy sweetness: the soft
chunks a comforting cradle of carb, the crisps a light crunch on the tongue.
The sea bass yields a fresh lick of the sea, the raw chunks delightfully dense,
the flavour bracingly clean. Small shards of red onion create a satisfying
crunch and a savoury vegetal tang. Heat is introduced by the aji amarillo
chilli, a slow-burning tingle which crescendos into a full-on samba-dance over
your tongue.

And it all swims joyously in ‘tiger's milk’, the coconut a smooth canvas
for the other ingredients to shine. And then a final flurry of salt and sour
lime, so the whole thing resembles a majestic Margarita cocktail. So clever.
So delicious. So healthy.

And not a million miles from the Tongan version. It’s perhaps the
closest you'll get to Polynesian cuisine in London. Just via Peru.

Have you been anywhere where you didn't quite take to the food? Were
there any redeeming features, or any other great things about the place? And if
you're from Tonga, have I got it all wrong, you tell me!..

4 comments

Attempt two at a post. No idea where the original went ... by the time I'd found my long defunct gmail account details, it was gone. I digress. Peru? When were you in Peru? Teotihucan and Ozzie I remember (I think) but Peru? Repetition; sorry. Read on ... ah, phew (mental faculties still partially intact). Fantastic piece and great photos - the young pilot/navigator - priceless. The ceviche looks rather good too. Awaiting part 2.